This was the title of an auction and the auction description - although it was quite short with 5 lines of text - sounded fair enough to buy this set. A few interesting games like Asteroids and Berzerk were also included, overall a fair deal. I thought. But as the following pictures will show, the term “mint condition” is far far away from the real condition. Trash would be more adequate …

These are the pictures of the Atari 2600 Set, which arrived about 10 days after I bought it - and keep in mind: Mint condition …

The contacts of the power supply are missing and some kind of a genius, replaced it with a standard power cable (the white cable with the plug, european version). The guy soldered the cable right into the adapter. While investigating his work, I found several blank parts. In Germany we have 220V and you can imagine, that it is no fun to accidently touch the cables.

The joystick is taped with clear tape (Tesa-Film), the screws are missing and while trying to lift it out of the package and I held the single components in my hands. The inside of the stick doesn’t look much better. Everything went right to the trash - no parts were reusable.

The console looked terrible and as we have seen before, the seller apparently liked to solder as much as he can: He relaced the power switch with a standard switch, but misplaced it so that the ‘Off’ position was in the wrong position. But instead of fixing this mistake he used a sticker to describe the new functionality.

Of course I couldn’t accept the condition of the set and asked the seller, why he was selling his soldered trash under the cover of ‘mint condition’. As always the seller reacted quit aggressive: “Bought as seen” and “The article was describe as used”. Concerning the power plug he stated: “The power supply is no security risk and even new power supplies can have short circuits”. He ended his reply with the statement “We aren’t on a turkish bazaar”. No, we aren’t. That’s eBay. Of course we left negative feedback before we filed a dispute and contacted PayPal … but this story will follow.